R.J. Talyor, CEO, Pattern89
As retail brands search for ways to attract and engage online customers, paid social is becoming the most powerful advertising method. Social channels like Facebook and Twitter offer brands the opportunity to connect one-on-one with audience members, deliver relevant messaging and build trust.
But that’s a tall order for an ad that has such a short life span. And with spending on social advertising rising steadily, increasing return on ad spend is a critical element of successful ad campaigns.
That means digital marketers must pay attention to how a social ad is built. From its goals to its architecture, maximizing the effectiveness of social ads requires attention to detail. Here are three ways to ensure you’re getting the most out of your social ad campaigns.
Identify Your Objectives
This seems simple, but it’s much more complicated than you might think. The objective of any social ad should be enticing a prospect to take an action. But which actions are best, and when? Which calls-to-action (CTAs) make the most sense, and which objectives should be paired with them?
That depends on how a brand approaches the customer journey and the sales funnel. Retailers must build ads that lay a clear path from awareness to consideration, and finally to decision. BigCommerce suggests using the awareness stage to educate audiences—both the social ads and the content it points to should help people learn more about the brand and its product. For the consideration and decision stages, more explicit appeals and conversion messaging are appropriate. The timing for ads is also important: delivering ads that match each stage of the funnel may mean running more than one ad at once. But no matter what the stage, setting the right objective for each social ad campaign is critical.
Examine the Elements
Creating the most relevant ads means taking a look at the individual pieces that make up a social ad’s whole. Consider elements like headline, body copy, images and CTAs, and how those parts can affect their readers; then experiment with each element to uncover what your audiences respond to most positively.
Buzzsumo’s massive study of article headlines reveals how audiences react to headlines that evoke emotion. A blog post and an ad are different animals, but headlines for each have the same goal: persuading someone to click and learn more. CTAs are similar: SproutSocial’s study of CTA phrases shows that persuasive, targeted phrases are most successful. Images and video are also integral elements of a successful social ad, and there are a wide range of ways to use them: Video can be a powerful medium for educating buyers, for instance. Facebook and Instagram’s carousel format offers retailers the chance to set up a mini-catalog of images or videos, delivering more targeted content at once. And Twitter’s cards provide an interactive element to ads that can be used as a CTA.
Iterate Constantly
As mentioned above, the lifespan of a social ad is vanishingly short. That means even the most successful social ads are only effective for a short period. The good news is that, with the right access to ad performance data, brands can pinpoint the most successful elements of their ad campaigns and improve on them for future campaigns. Iteration is important because, while the basics of social ads rarely change, the medium itself changes daily.
It’s the access to performance data that can make or break steady ad improvement; and for channels like Facebook and Twitter, increasing performance can also help stretch ad budgets. Social channels with their own ads managers can deliver statistics and data points, but marketers shouldn’t rely on ad manager data alone. Seeking industry benchmark data can reveal how successful a brand’s ads are against other brands in their space, opening a new range of possibilities for iteration.
Machine learning can also reveal valuable insights to retail brands. Most social channels use machine learning or AI to develop algorithms that reveal ad performance and audience stats. But solutions that combine machine learning/AI and data science to uncover the best elements of an ad can provide more personalized insights. With that information, brands can accelerate iteration and improvement.
There are retail brands that have learned how to deliver the best, most relevant ads to their audiences and customers. That’s because they view social ads as a sum of dozens of parts, and see each part as important as every other. Choosing the right objectives and committing to iteration can yield positive results as well. Social ads are the future of advertising–and brands that succeed will do what they can to embrace that future.
Pattern89, formerly Quantifi, provides a social advertising platform that combines artificial intelligence and campaign automation with industry benchmark data.
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